These poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination ... At the center of many of these poems is the black queer body as it moves through a range of contemporary American spaces, some comparatively safe, many potentially lethal. The mind that tracks it—imagining its outcomes, adjusting to its setbacks, processing its sudden drives and imperatives—is a wild and unpredictable instrument. In an extraordinary poem about sex and death, 'strange dowry,' Smith finds themselves in a strobe-lit bar, checked out by potential lovers...Spontaneity is the great virtue of this work, but calculation is a survival skill. The open-endedness of 'strange dowry' is matched, in this book, by a grim determinism. In 'it won’t be a bullet,' Smith’s advantages over 'the kind of black man who dies on the news' are offset by H.I.V., which targets black men by a different standard of intention ... In this moving, unsettling work, the question is not simply one of craft. It’s about how the body and its authority can be manifested in writing, with only the spindly trace of letters to stand in for it ... it forces you, the reader, to say aloud, to embody, the words, while leaving a gap for the inevitable differences of race or gender identity, of illness and health, that might sometimes seem unbridgeable. They might be unbridgeable; but they are not unimaginable.

Smith, a performance poet who has won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, among other honors, takes aim at the racism and inequities in America that make many black people fear for their safety on a daily basis. Smith, who identifies with neither gender, also writes about sex, desire and the HIV diagnosis that resulted after one lover came over '& then he left/but he stayed.' As this stunning collection unfolds, the speaker weaves together personal sickness with societal ills, wondering 'just how/ will I survive the little/ cops running inside/ my veins.' These pieces pulse with the rhythms and assertiveness one expects from poetry slams. They also demand that people understand why the speaker wants to leave Earth 'to find a land where my kin can be safe.'

With piercing precision and striking formal variation, Smith grapples with America’s insidious past and present, pangs of desire ('if love is a room / of broken glass, leave me to dance / until my feet are memory'), and an HIV-positive diagnosis. The poet summons hope, too, in a movie dubbed Dinosaurs in the Hood, the modest promise of tomorrow, and, in 'little prayer,' a most divine demand: 'let ruin end here.' Part indelible elegy, part glorious love song to 'those brown folks who make / up the nation of my heart,' Smith’s powerhouse collection is lush with luminous imagery, slick rhythms, and shrewd nods to Lucille Clifton, Beyoncé, and Diana Ross. Incandescent, indispensable, and, yes, nothing short of a miracle.

Though 'summer, somewhere' is about the afterlife, the rest of Don’t Call Us Dead is about life and death on earth. Again, the central figure is the body: the black body, the queer body, the safe body, the sick body, the dead body. These poems show us that there are things other than violence that kill ... What is so extraordinary about this collection is its lyricism, its humanity, and its urgency ... The brave nature of these poems is not only in calling out a country for its lack of empathy, but also in the very visceral way that sex, disease, and death are used to confront the reader ...an historical commentary, a scientific document, a personal narrative, and a formal poetics ... Smith uses every tool of craft at a poet’s disposal to deliver powerful, urgent, deliberate, crucial poems. Don’t miss this book.

Vivid, unsettling and uplifting all at once, the second full-length from award-winning poet Danez Smith is part elegy, part celebration and part poetry-as-witness ... Smith is a poet famous for fiery performances and their passionate confidence bursts through the seams of these poems, whose subjects range from police brutality, to the complexities of queer eroticism, to the very experience of living in a country tha threatens the lives of queer people of color daily ... Not content to merely allow us to play witness to the horrors of oppression, Smith’s poems pull us into it; they brim with blood, violence, aches and broken bodies. But there is humor, too, and hope, and it’s this hope that elevates the book to its crucial contemporary importance: 'but today i’m alive, which is to say / i survived yesterday, spent it ducking bullets, some / flying toward me & some / trying to rip their way out.'

Danez Smith...echoes the plural, expanded lyric voices of poets such as Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka and Langston Hughes. Like Smith’s prize-winning debut collection, [insert] boy, their follow-up Don’t Call Us Dead excoriates America for its violence towards citizens outside a white heterosexual majority … The poem is an extended sequence, a dream-like vision of “unfuneraling” black boys caught up in the US’s insatiable gun battle with itself. Here we find anguish for lives severed in their prime … Smith deserves a willing and sympathetic audience, one that is already swiftly building, to hear it. But one also hopes this book reaches readers who will have the courage to acknowledge their arbitrary power and privilege.

This book made me slam it shut a few times to keep from weeping in restaurants. Not because the poems are sad. Or because they are joyful. But because they are both, and neither. They confront the world(s) we live in... and imagine others... in ways and in language so precise and evocative that we lament and yearn right along with these searing, soaring poems ... There are fables, myths, and metaphor enough to set the mind reeling, and lines so plainspoken and sharp they go straight to the gut ... Dear a/America: Pay attention to Danez Smith. Read this book. But maybe not in restaurants.

Smith follows the Lambda Literary Award–winning debut [insert] boy with a further display of transcendent talent for close-to-the bone articulation ... Smith brilliantly metaphorizes the experience of receiving an HIV diagnosis in Lorca-esque fashion, as becoming 'a book of antonyms' and leavens the gravity with moments of mordant wit ... Luminous and piercing, this collection reassembles shattering realities into a shimmering and sharp mosaic.